Joyride update

We’re writing with an update about our transit app. In the months since the project was successfully funded with your support, we’ve built and launched a beta version of the app, which we called Joyride. We’ve assembled the necessary transit service data to power the site, and received excellent feedback from our beta testers. We’ve shared all this work as an open source project.

Despite the successes so far, we’re stopping work on Joyride, and refunding you. Here’s why: the trip planning in Joyride depends on up to date, accurate transit data, which we assemble from open data feeds provided by hundreds of individual transit operators. In the new year, the OpenTripPlanner team is spinning out from OpenPlans. With their departure, we won’t have the capacity here to keep the app up to date, and we’re not prepared to launch without being certain we can offer a viable ongoing service that people can depend on for their daily travel needs.

The OpenTripPlanner project, on which Joyride is based, has grown into a thriving open source community. We are releasing the Joyride code in the hopes that another group of transit developers will use it in the future. And there are other fantastic OTP-based apps already available in the App Store. Check out The Transit App and Moovit to see if they support your community.

We're proud of the work we've done on Joyride, and deeply appreciate the support you've all given us through your Kickstarter donations. Since we will be unable to deliver a final version that can be supported long term, we are returning your donations. You should see those returns in your Amazon payments accounts soon.

Thanks again for your support. Please feel free to contact us at joyride@openplans.org if you have questions.

Comments

Backers, please contact us via support@openplans.org if you have questions about your refund. We processed them a couple of weeks ago, so you should be all set, but please let us know if you haven't seen it yet or have other questions.

Much thanks for all the work to move the bar on this critical piece of civic infrastructure. I know some backers got access to beta test the app, is this still something any of us could access? I'm also curious if you have any suggestions for iOS routing apps for bikes. None of the apps mentioned earlier seem to cover bike routes nor does the recently released Google Maps for iOS.

As mentioned in the post, the decision is primarily the result of an organizational shift that makes it unlikely that we'd be able support the end-user application in the long-run. Given that change, refunding the money seems like the right thing to do.

Further, the main focus of our transit technology team has been building the core open source routing engine, OpenTripPlanner. Our interest in creating a consumer application was primarily to demonstrate how that technology can be used to fill the gap left by the Google/iOS schism (and solve quite a few other problems as well). We feel like that has been proven as others have already launched successful universal transit apps based on OpenTripPlanner. The Transit App, which has extensive U.S. and Canadian coverage and Moovit, with hundreds of thousands of users abroad, are two great examples.

Going forward our team will continue work advancing the routing engine and building clearer frameworks to support the growing community of users. We're quite proud of how the OpenTripPlanner project as evolved. It's a shining example of a successful open source project.

This news does come as a surprise, and I'd really appreciate a more complete explanation. There isn't anything on either the OpenPlans or OpenTripPlanner websites about this "spinning out" - can we get a "why"? (The refunds are a nice gesture, and I am very glad that the front end you developed has been open sourced; this just feels so sudden and I'd really like to know what happened.)

On a related note, do you know what it WOULD take to get the back end for this service (which seems to be the limiting factor keeping you from a go live) organized and run in a sustainable manner?